Europe’s Immigration/Assimilation Problem
Schaerbeek Town Hall
Fascinating find from The Economist:
There can never be full integration of the migrants “swarming” into Brussels, according to a report by the Royal Belgian Geographical Society—at least among the current generation of adults. The immigrants are too different in their religious beliefs and customs, and their impact is too overwhelming. “When they are sufficiently numerous in a neighbourhood” they open their own hairdressing salons, grocery shops and bakeries, the report notes, not to mention “butcher’s shops where they sell meat from ritually slaughtered animals”. They have large families and cram twice the agreed number of tenants into flats, creating “deplorable” living conditions, annoying landlords and disturbing their neighbours. Perhaps “partial assimilation” may one day be achieved, it concludes, but it will be hard: the newcomers’ religion and language “do not ease any attempts at contact.”
The report in question? It dates from 1933 and describes the panic caused by Jewish immigrants from Poland, when they moved into Brussels neighbourhoods like Schaerbeek. It was recently unearthed by Anne Morelli, a professor of history of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Prof Morelli reproduces a long extract from the report in this thoughtful essay for KVS Express, an excellent trilingual journal published by the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels. The report is in English on page 18 of this pdf file.
And of course you see this in the United States, too, as anti-immigration rhetoric tends to very precisely parallel what was said about the un-assimilability of Jews and Catholics before the first world war. There’s even a parallel between the very real problems associated with violent strains of Islamist ideology among European Muslim Communities and the only quite real problem of anarchist violence that was associated with U.S. immigrant communities. I assume that if Nicholas Sarkozy were to be shot and killed by a French Muslim tomorrow, we’d never here the end of talk about “Eurabia” and so forth yet Leon Czolgosz didn’t prefigure the destruction of the United States at the hands of mass wave of Polish political violence.
75 Responses to “Europe’s Immigration/Assimilation Problem”
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September 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Sarkozy (as is quite evident even by his name) is of course of Hungarian and Sephardic descent, and not anywhere approaching solid French stock – though his father was a wealthy immigrant, he was still an immigrant.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Gee, what may have happened to the Jews in places like Belgium between 1933 and now?
Wait, wait, don’t tell me! It’ll come to me, I’m sure…
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
The worry about assimilation seems much bigger in countries that don’t have a birthright to citizenship…i.e. most European countries.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Gee, what may have happened to the Jews in places like Belgium between 1933 and now?
Wait, wait, don’t tell me! It’ll come to me, I’m sure…
Err, I hate to agree with Al, but yea.
One of the major reasons the Danish community got saved was that they were absolutely assimilated and an ancient part of Denmark; but the Central and Eastern European Jews in Holland and Belgium and France didn’t make out well. Frankly the Central/Eastern Jews in Britain were never very popular either (fun fact: a lot of the neighborhoods they lived in in London are now the neighborhoods where the Muslim South Asians are living), and I don’t think that they would have survived any better had they not been on an island.
So, in response, they decided to create their own country where for once *they* wouldn’t have to assimilate. C’mon, you know this, Matt.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:55 pm
And of course you see this in the United States, too, as anti-immigration rhetoric tends to very precisely parallel what was said about the un-assimilability of Jews and Catholics before the first world war.
There’s not really any Catholic country that hadn’t been very strongly affected by the enlightenment, however, by, say the mid 1800s. To put it another way, although elements of the Catholic world had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the post medieval world, eventually the project was largely completed, and the contribution of various rationalist thinkers from Catholic countries was immense. Similarly, the Jews were at the very heart of Europe’s enlightenment, and produced many of the West’s most profound thinkers. In retrospect, it’s clear the anti-immigration rhetoric circa 1910 was misguided (as is the anti-immigration rhetoric in the US circa 2009, as the bulk of today’s immigrants to the US hail from Latin America or the non-Muslim parts of Asia).
But let’s face it, large portions of the Islamic world haven’t gone through the enlightenment yet. I wish it weren’t so, but I have to believe the plain evidence. Doesn’t mean western societies should prohibit immigration from Islamic countries, nor does it mean that such immigrants are incapable of being shaped and influenced by their new homelands. It does mean, though, that caution is in order.
I’m trying to be frank about my own (perhaps irrational?) fears here. I’ve tended to be one of the more vociferous pro immigration voices found on this site and others. I guess what I’m trying to say is: I’m pretty comfortable with largish inflows of immigrants from places like Mexico, Guatemala, and China. But I shamefully admit to being a lot less comfortable about similar numbers from Pakistan and Egypt.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:57 pm
So, er, the Holocaust proves that Eastern European Jews were unassimilable?
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Rather like large portions of the Christian US.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
The fact that Voltaire was French and Moses Mendelssohn a Jew was not particularly comforting to people who were faced with pious Catholic Sicilian and Irish peasants and Orthodox Jews from Poland. People at the time said the exact same thing about those groups not experiencing the Enlightenment.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:01 pm
So, in response, they decided to create their own country where for once *they* wouldn’t have to assimilate.
And how’s that working out for them? Looks to me like their American cousins are doing a hell of a lot better right now (even after taking into account the fact that some of the Americans’ tax dollars are going to arm and fund Israel and pick fights with anyone who the Israelis think might be a potential future threat).
Although Al’s point that anti-immigrant rhetoric may escalate into a genocidal fascist state if given a chance is worth bearing in mind, whenever you think about a modern political party that traffics in anti-immigrant rhetoric. (I’m so surprised to see Al making a good point that I suspect it might be someone else with the same name, but nevertheless, it IS a good point.)
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Rather like large portions of the Christian US.
Where on earth do you think the people unwilling to accept the (admittedly authoritarian) religious settlement of the late 17th through the early 19th Centuries went?
The Palatinate, which had the militant Calvinists who thought they could take on the Empire, sent the bulk of German settlers to the US, the Anabaptists and the other Radical Reformed sects couldn’t deal with the state, and so they left, and the even more militant Calvinists who temporarily ran England, well eventually they left too.
Our Christianists are a devil’s blend of militant Calvinists and the Radical Reformers (ie. where the hell do you think the Baptists got the name from? it wasn’t random) everybody else in Europe threw out.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I’d recommend that Belgians intermarry with the newcomers and let the immigrants onto their golf courses. It’s better than the Englightenment for assimilation purposes. Sex and golf.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:05 pm
And how’s that working out for them? Looks to me like their American cousins are doing a hell of a lot better right now (even after taking into account the fact that some of the Americans’ tax dollars are going to arm and fund Israel and pick fights with anyone who the Israelis think might be a potential future threat).
I didn’t say things were going well. I said that was their motivation. Personally, I agree, American Jews are in a pretty great place these days. However, there’s still a *lot* of anti-semitism out there, and on both Right and Left – though the Anti-semites on the Right are also usually those who support Israel for racist and radical religious reasons.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Assimilation is a funny word.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Reformation and Enlightenment are two different things.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
(fun fact: a lot of the neighborhoods they lived in in London are now the neighborhoods where the Muslim South Asians are living)
And in other towns, particularly in the north of England and Scotland, Muslim immigrants moved into the areas where Irish, Italian and other Catholic immigrants had previously settled in the early decades of the 20th century. And yes, the Irish and Italians had their own churches and social clubs and so on.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:21 pm
As an American living in Belgium, I have to say that Belgians tend to do whatever they can to not make waves. It seems to me that the North African immigrants are taking advantage of this situation, and that it’s not going to end well.
Also, the racism I see in Europe in general is an order of magnitude worse than what I’ve seen in the States. I tell people that IMHO Americans are over-sensitive to race issues, but Europeans aren’t sensitive enough. Some of the stuff I’ve seen here just boggles the mind. It’s primarily directed towards blacks and North Africans.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Call me a hopeless booster, but I think that capitalism and democracy are so awesome that immigrants will universally buy into the whole deal once they’re here a generation or two. Hell, my Irish ancestors managed to figure it all out, and we’re about as tribal as they come.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:24 pm
@5: It seems to me that you’re declaring Muslims guilty until proven innocent. I suppose we could ask the one Muslim to be elected to Congress whether he intended his oath to uphold the Constitution seriously, or whether he really wants to overthrow the First and Fourteenth Amendments and impose sharia law, but the question seems somewhat absurd, not to mention insulting. And he isn’t a majority (let alone a veto-overriding one) anyway.
Personally, I would like to see Christianity become a non-majority religion in the U.S., even if it remained a plurality. It might teach them some humility. (I know, ironic, right?) The existence of lots of major religions/belief systems is better for religious freedom than demographic domination by one, because any one religion in the former situation that gets delusions of grandeur will pretty likely be slapped down by a coalition of the others. Different sects of Christianity have this effect to some extent, but not a very strong one. (See, for example, our quite strong and basically religious taboo against polygamy – all Christians except some Mormons agree on it, so what other people and other religions think doesn’t matter. Despite the fact that it’s a bald-faced codification of religious law into nominally secular law, there’s basically no chance that a Supreme Court of eight Christians and one Jew is going to consider the issue, even if anyone dared to raise it.)
As for the Enlightenment, they’ll learn about it in school. (I do think that religious and home schooling should be supervised to ensure that it doesn’t become an indoctrination mill closed off from the national culture and discourse. Going to school with other Americans is a powerful force in Americanizing the children of immigrants.) But I think there’s a good chance that *the specific people in those countries who choose to immigrate to the U.S.* are more sympathetic to the goals and institutions of the U.S. than the average in their country of origin – nobody voluntarily chooses to live under the rule of the Great Satan if they actually believe that’s what it is.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Let’s compare the size of the populations in Belgium:
Jews: 31,200
Muslims: 374,916
Seems to me that the success of a tiny, tiny (post-WWII) minority of Belgian citizens in assimilating (assuming they have! – I have never been to Belgium) says very little about the ability of a much more numerous minority in assimilating.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
One key difference: a sizeable minority of the muslim immigrants to Europe want to see aspects of their belief system (particularly around the rights of women) enforced across society. The Jewish immigrants to the US had no such desire.
Not to mention that the over-culture of the early 20th century was – unlike the one Matt’s side of the aisle advocates for now – strongly assimilationist.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Re: I think that capitalism and democracy are so awesome that immigrants will universally buy into the whole deal once they’re here a generation or two
Of course. Why follow Christ, Allah or Vishnu when you could be into Pot, P*rn and Playstations instead.
Capitalism and ‘democracy’ may rule the field for awhile, but in the end they will fall, just as Rome and Babylon fell before them. And my feelings on the conflict between Jihadism and Liberal Capitalism are, as Ivan Karamazov said, “Let one reptile devour the other”.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Al writes: Gee, what may have happened to the Jews in places like Belgium between 1933 and now?
Gosh, so if it hadn’t been for the holocaust, those alien Jewish immigrants would have destroyed Belgium by now?
I knew you were a right-wing nut, Al, but I didn’t realize how far gone you were. Nice.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Re: nobody voluntarily chooses to live under the rule of the Great Satan if they actually believe that’s what it is.
Nonsense. The Nazi-Klansman state of Apartheid South Africa had a net immigration rate from the independent nations of Southern Africa. That doesn’t mean that the immigrants liked being treated as oppressed subhumans, it meant they liked starvation even less.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Jeffrey Davis @11: somehow I first read you as advocating sex on the golf course. Which, OK.
chris @18: I realize it’s a reductio, but Glenn Beck actually did that.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Those who keep saying that “holocaust proves Jews can’t assimilate” or some such bullshit have to understand the mechanism of the Shoah outside of the East.
In the East, the Reich Main Security Office relied on the Wehrmacht to help the SS, either in aiding the Einsatzgruppen or providing transport capacity to the camps or whatever.
In the West, and in a lot of Southern Europe, the RSHA asked for and overwhelmingly received the support of various local and national authorities.
In Belgium, France, and especially Holland, this proved to be extraordinarily helpful. In Denmark, advance notice from Reich allowed the entire Jewish population to be spirited away.
Part of the Danes’ success comes from the size of the population involved.
But a lot of it was that the Danes saw *their Jews* as being Danes first.
In Holland, as I recall especially, there was a very strong feeling that these often Hungarians and Germans and Poles and Russians and what have you were aliens and worthy of no support.
Anne Frank notwithstanding, the Dutch did a spectacularly bad job protecting their Jews, because they were irked over the lack of assimilation. Same with a lot of Frenchmen and Belgians and others.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I think Al’s point is that they brought it on themselves.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
You know, like they did to New York. And Jerusalem.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 pm
As always, Matt’s thinking on immigration and race is stuck deep in the past, long before he was born. He never, ever thinks about the future.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm
re: 25 and the liquidation of Eastern European Jews
One of the biggest surprises to me in the Holocaust Museum was how few Bulgarian Jews were surrendered to the Nazis. My neolithic image of Bulgarians was a blur of steroid-taking female Olympians and would-be papal assassins.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Muslims in the US tend to be more educated than those in Europe. Being able to get a decent job and a decent house tends to make one less angry.
Happy people tend not to form ghettoes. Not being stuck in a ghetto makes it easier to find a decent job and a decent house. And so forth and so on.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:03 pm
In America, when they wanted to talk about how to get rid of the Indians, they called it the Indian Question.
In Europe, when they wanted to discuss how to get rid of the Jews, they called it the Jewish Question.
In Australia, they called it the Aboriginal Question.
Now they’d like to pose a Muslim Question.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:03 pm
If I drew my politics from the same stream as Steve Sailer, I’d discourage people from thinking about the past, too.
Hey, nevermind all that stuff people like me did! Who wants to trouble their minds with lynchings, genocides, and barbed-wire-topped concrete walls?
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Never mind that this report from 1933 sounds a heck of a lot like what the right-wing in Europe about Muslims or what the right-wing in the USA says about Latinos. It’s obviously Matt who is the one that’s stuck in the past.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Never mind that this report from 1933 sounds a heck of a lot like what the right-wing in Europe about Muslims or what the right-wing in the USA says about Latinos. It’s obviously Matt who is the one that’s stuck in the past.
It wasn’t the left wing that showed the SS where the Jews were hiding in Belgium or Holland or France or Hungary.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
The fact that Voltaire was French and Moses Mendelssohn a Jew was not particularly comforting to people who were faced with pious Catholic Sicilian and Irish peasants and Orthodox Jews from Poland.
That’s not my point; I’d heartily agree that the anti-immigrant arguments of said people in 1910 were wrong. And that’s largely because of the substantive effects on the immigrant communities in question flowing from the world view and teachings of people like Voltaire and Mendelssohn. A peasant arriving in New York from Lithuania or Sicily in 1910 may not have looked or sounded much like an eighth generation American; but I would argue the effects of growing up in a part of the world — Europe — where the influence of such enlightment thinking was strong and widespread — insured that looks were deceiving, and that in fact such people were far more prepared for a speedy and relatively trouble-free absorption into American society than was commonly supposed by the Americans of the day. I’d furthermore argue that much the same is true today for the entire planet, with the exception of the more radicalized and paranoid parts of the Islamic world.
I’d just feel more comfortable with mass immigration from the Islamic world after the appearance of a Muslim Voltaire. For Americans, of course, such discussions are a little beside the point, as immigration law and geography seem to guarantee that our immigrants will continue to mostly not arrive from such places.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Gosh, so if it hadn’t been for the holocaust, those alien Jewish immigrants would have destroyed Belgium by now?
I don’t know where you get “destroyed” from. That certainly wasn’t in my post, nor was it even in Matthew’s post. The point simply was that if it hadn’t been for the holocaust, the Jewish immigrants likely would be less assimilated now than they are. The entire point of the quoted article is that it is difficult to assimilate large populations of immigrants in Europe. The Jews of Belgium do not provide a counterexample to this claim because the holocaust substantially reduced the population of Jews living in Belgium.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Al, your example doesn’t make sense. Take Germany which had more Jews than Belgium. The pathology that was National Socialism changed things. Jews in Germany were fairly well assimilated until Germans went nuts for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with assimilation. Unless you want to chime in with blaming WW1 on the Jews.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Al, your example doesn’t make sense. Take Germany which had more Jews than Belgium. The pathology that was National Socialism changed things. Jews in Germany were fairly well assimilated until Germans went nuts for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with assimilation. Unless you want to chime in with blaming WW1 on the Jews.
You’re right, he doesn’t make sense.
*But* a lot of the German Jews killed in the Holocaust were those who had fled to France or the Low Countries, where they were turned in by the locals.
Moreover, the RSHA did not begin by killing large numbers of German Jews. It began by saying these Jews were being relocated. So it was a two step or more process.
1. Tell Jews they’re being relocated East; this happened, btw, before anyone in RSHA had decided on what precisely to do with them
2. Round up Jews in Ghettos/Work Camps, and get rid of them
Originally, this happened through shooting and gas vans, and eventually though extermination camps.
But the Germans in Germany were very clever and very subtle. The roundups you see in Schindler’s List, again, as I said earlier, are a result of the RSHA’s operations in the East – which were under official military occupation – whereas in the West, things were done much quieter, but still pretty brutally.
In fact, I think that if the Germans had tried roundups like those in Poland, the Balts, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and eventually Southern Europe, in Germany and in 1937 or 38, there would have been a *hell* of a lot more people opposing the Nazis. Moreover, this wouldn’t have been done under military rule and would have been reported. The Pope, for one thing, might have actually had the stones to condemn this, and for a hell of a lot of Catholics, unlike the insanely brave Stauffenberg, that would have given them the out they were looking for in the Loyalty Oath to Hitler.
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Re: were those who had fled to France
I can’t wait for Myles SG drop in on this thread and tell us how much he admires the late and unlamented Marshal Petain.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
in Germany were fairly well assimilated until Germans went nuts for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with assimilation.
Perhaps they were less assimilated than you think they were.
In any event, were the German Jews recent immigrants, the way that they Belgians were? The question is whether immgrants can assimilate in large numbers in Europe, not whether Jews can.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with my views on immigration in the United States; I think that we ought to permit much, much more immigration than we currently do.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I think that we ought to permit much, much more immigration than we currently do.
Whoa, I actually agree with Al on something.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Hector,
Off topic, but you seem to bash Playstation a lot. What gives? What did the PSP ever do to you? (Or are you just an Xbox loyalist?)
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:36 pm
This probably goes without saying, but the idea promoted by Jasper @5 that the people of the world can be divided, in manichean fashion, between “those who have gone through enlightenment” and “those who have not” is well beyond idiotic.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Has Matthew Yglesias ever heard of “Generations of Exclusion”? There are actual sociologists that study this sort of issue, you know.
The complaint about immigrant enterprise gave the anachronism away. These days Europeans complain about immigrants filling up the welfare rolls and prisons rather than shops. I imagine that the complaints back then about gypsies were roughly the same as the ones still heard in Europe about them now though.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Quite frankly, the Europeans could use a little more color. They won’t like it, of course, but nobody likes change. The like to complain about our racism problem in the 1950s, but the reason they didn’t have one is because they exterminated everyone who wasn’t a white Christian. The Germans were really nasty, but everyone else went along. Genocide really wasn’t the issue. In fact, it was the one issue everyone pretty much agreed upon. And with the Roma (gypsies), they still agree. If the Europeans could get away with exterminating more of the Roma, they’d do it in a heartbeat. You always hear about how Hitler killed six million Jews. How many of the Roma did he kill? About a million, but it doesn’t even exist as a minor blip in history. And it’s hard to tell because the Germans didn’t consider them human enough to be worthy of documentation. At least when a Jew died, they’d record the death. The Roma were legally considered nothing more than dogs. Oh those people? Yeah, we really did want to kill them. And nobody likes them anyway, so no problem. Walk away, nothing to see here. I suspect when the Europeans exterminate the Muslims, the silence will be equally deafening. The Europeans can take their self righteous posturing about racism and shove it right up their racist asses. They are far worse than us, and we’re already far worse than any human should be.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Whoa, I actually agree with Al on something.
Here, I’ll amend the statement in a manner that might help you: I think that we ought to permit much, much more immigration than we currently do in order to keep wages down.
You’re welcome.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
And if you got the impression that I hate the fucking Europeans, you’d be right. But when I hate people, I don’t try to exterminate them. The Europeans do, and they’re still trying to do it right now with the Roma. When they’re done with them, the Muslims are next. Fuck those racist bastards.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Re: In the East, the Reich Main Security Office relied on the Wehrmacht to help the SS, either in aiding the Einsatzgruppen or providing transport capacity to the camps or whatever.
One big exception was Bulagria, which flat out refused to deport its Jews. Bulgaria was a German ally not a conquest, so it had a degree of autonomy about the matter, but the same also applied in neighboring Romania which was all too happy to dispatch its Jews to the camps. That Bulgaria ended WWII with more Jewish people than it began with is something this much-ignored country should be honored for.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I think that we ought to permit much, much more immigration than we currently do in order to keep wages down.
Well, I think we should allow in as many people as can find work, and if the legal minimum wage goes down as a result, that’s a reasonable tradeoff against the millions of people living here with no legal rights. We should aim to set both the legal minimum wage and legal immigration at the highest points that minimize the number of people coming in illegally.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:30 pm
“That Bulgaria ended WWII with more Jewish people than it began with is something this much-ignored country should be honored for.”
That is right. The Bulgarians are pretty weird, but they are good people. They deserve some real credit for their conduct. They should not be lumped in with the rest of the Europeans. And neither should the Muslims. The Muslims were the only people in Europe trying to save the Jews. Would have been nice to see the Catholic Church pitch in, but, oh yeah, they did. Except they were on the Nazi side. And this church is considered a credible religion? Prior to the Council of Nicaea, they were. But they really went downhill from there. These days, they should be considered a mafia at best. But hey, at least they aren’t an army like they used to be.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Nah, they went downhill already from the reign of Constantine, when they sold out for the goodies that came of being the state religion of a military empire- not exactly what Jesus had in mind.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:53 pm
And Hector, can’t you just spell the words out? I know you have some moral issues about bad words. But we’re adults here. We’ve heard them before. And if we hadn’t, then we wouldn’t know how to read what you’re writing. Without prior knowledge, how would we know? With prior knowledge, why would we care?
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:59 pm
“Nah, they went downhill already from the reign of Constantine”
Huh? For the record, Constantine convened the the first council of Nicaea. I kind of see that as that being one and the same. What I don’t like about Constantine is the Council of Nicaea. Well among other bad things he did. But fundamentally, he turned Christianity into a Roman religion. And the Council of Nicaea is precisely when and where that happened.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Sorry, I was unclear- I meant to say the process started the moment the bishops decided to accept being Constantine’s pets, which was years before Nicaea.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:12 pm
but the idea promoted by Jasper @5 that the people of the world can be divided, in manichean fashion, between “those who
I’m not promoting a Manichean view of the world. I’m saying that a western country that espouses liberal, pluralistic values and tolerance is better off to the extent that it can get its immigrants where such values are less threatened. I wish such values were not under siege, but in fact they are. There are obviously gradations. Still, I bet many a liberal Belgian or Swede would switch “immigration mixes” with the US if they could.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Re: But fundamentally, he turned Christianity into a Roman religion. And the Council of Nicaea is precisely when and where that happened.
There isn’t a close connection between the Nicene Council and Christianity becoming a Roman religion. Culturally it already was Roman, or rather Greco-Roman; and legally it would not become THE Roman religion until the reign of Theodosios 60 years afterward). The Council of Nicaea resoloved some theological issues (mainly Ariaism) and issued a bunch of practical “how-to” directives the most significant was to determine the dating of Easter. Constantine was perhaps quite high-handed in summoning the Council and he threw his weight around a bit at its sessions, but I can’t see that Nicaea marks some major break in Christian belief or practice.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:23 pm
“Sorry, I was unclear- I meant to say the process started the moment the bishops decided to accept being Constantine’s pets, which was years before Nicaea.”
Fair enough. But ultimately, the First Council of Nyceae is really where the banished most of the Apostles from Christianity and brought in the new guy, Paul, as the primary savior. And he never met Jesus and didn’t even hear his words at all. Thomas was Jesus’s greatest messenger. he took the word the farthest, and actually established a real church. And he doesn’t get a book at all. Bartholomew spread the Gospel to more people than Paul, but he doesn’t have a book either. Why is Paul, the guy who never met Jesus, more important than Jesus himself? Jesus was way cool, and without the Council of Nicaea, Christianity would have been a great religion. Instead, it simply supports modern Roman rule. Christianity rejects the Book of Thomas, but read it, it’s really cool. Much better than the crap Paul said. I’d be a Christian if they gave damn about the words of the Apostles. But when they reject most of them, sorry, it’s just Romanism.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:30 pm
“but I can’t see that Nicaea marks some major break in Christian belief or practice.”
It decided which writing were in, and which writing were out. Think that might have an effect on belief. You read Paul, not Thomas because of that. So read Thomas and explain to me how it’s inclusion into the New Testament wouldn’t change it all. And take out Ephesians, and tell me how that wouldn’t change anything. Just some minor corrections to the Bible, who’d notice? Well, it’s the very basis of the largest religion in the world. And what is Gospel and what is Heretical was decided there. Switch the books, and it’s a different religion. One that I might like.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Sorry, the ’s’ key is sticky today. Spilled a beer last night.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:40 pm
And let’s get real, take out everything in the Bible that’s not the words of Jesus. What do you have left? I tiny pamphlet. Now compare that to Paul’s writings. Who get’s star billing in the Bible? Paul, not Jesus. So why isn’t it just called Paulism?
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:43 pm
@fostert Christianity would have been a whole lot better without Paul. (And if no Paul, probably none of the worst excesses of the wonderful (no sarcasm) Augustine).
So I agree with you.
And he never met Jesus and didn’t even hear his words at all.
Let me preempt objection here and point out that spending time with Jesus as the (other) apostles did is a completely different animal from having a single mystical experience in Syria.
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Immigration may be the one thing that Americans do better than Europe. Well that and politeness (at least better than continental Europeans). And national parks. We kick ass on those.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Re: Anne Frank notwithstanding,
Greg,
Anne Frank died, if I recall correctly after being betrayed by neighbors, so she proves your point rather than detracting from it.
Fostert,
Hoo boy. I respect you and your posts here a lot, the bee in your bonnet about Christianity notwithstanding, so I’m going to respond to you with minimal acerbity.
Re: But fundamentally, he turned Christianity into a Roman religion.
Jesus himself foretold that Christianity would become a state religion and acquire political power:
“And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father” (Revelation 2:26-27).
so your beef is with Jesus more than Constantine.
Re: Christianity rejects the Book of Thomas, but read it, it’s really cool.
I’ve read the Gospel of Thomas (and Acts of Thomas) and am a big fan of Thomas the person, not least because he was the apostle to my people. You should read the Acts of Thomas, it features Thomas talking to snakes.
I quibble with some of your history, and I think that it was necessary to formulate a canon and decide what was in it (as well as which teachings, like Arianism, were beyond the pale). I do agree with you, sadly, that the suppression of ‘heretical’ books caused us to lose a lot of interesting material, which even though we may not agree with, we can still benefit from reading. It’s good to read about heterodox variants of Christianity, as it is good to read about other versions of Christianity. Sometimes we can even learn things from them: truth isn’t always something one side has a total grasp on. However, I do think the Council of Nicaea was a good and necessary thing insofar as it rejected Arianism, which was a dangerous threat to Trinitarian doctrine.
Re: Christianity would have been a whole lot better without Paul. (And if no Paul, probably none of the worst excesses of the wonderful (no sarcasm) Augustine).
Lorax, I don’t think so. The stuff about Hell in the Bible, and how “straight and easy is the way that leads to perdition, and many there are who enter therein” are from Jesus. The stuff about “Woe unto thee, Chorazin” is from Jesus. The stuff about “he who hateth not his mother and father” is from Jesus. The stuff about “he that believeth not is condemned already” is from Jesus. The stuff about “they shall go into eternal punishment, but the righteous into life eternal” is from Jesus. The really harsh doctrines are, unfortunately, Dominical.
Re: The Muslims were the only people in Europe trying to save the Jews.
Of course, Fostert. That would be why the Mufti of Jerusalem led a batallion of Bosnian Muslim volunteers trying to root out Jews in Yugoslavia and hand them over to the Germans. I’m not saying the Muslims were any worse than the Christians, but they weren’t angels either. And the Vatican did condemn Nazism (as well as the prewar French Fascists under Maurras), though not strongly enough. Nazism itself, of course, was an secular doctrine.
Oddly enough Franco, in spite of his fanatical anti-Semitism, didn’t have the stomach to actually hand the Spanish Jews over to be murdered, and he allowed Jews from France and Greece safe conduct through Spain to escape from the Holocaust. Apparently the Bulgarian fascist regime did much the same.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Oddly enough Franco, in spite of his fanatical anti-Semitism, didn’t have the stomach to actually hand the Spanish Jews over to be murdered, and he allowed Jews from France and Greece safe conduct through Spain to escape from the Holocaust. Apparently the Bulgarian fascist regime did much the same.
Franco was probably part Jewish.
This was, um, left unsaid by Spanish diplomats when they had to deal with the Fuehrer.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:37 pm
And seconding Hector in #63, I should point out that one of the most bloody-minded books in the new testament, Revelation, was written by an original apostle, John, not by Paul.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:41 pm
I think Al’s larger point in #2 is not that the Jews “were asking for it” (they weren’t) nor do I think that his original intention was to suggest that the Holocaust made assimilation easier (I am going to assume that when he implied that, was having trouble putting his point into words).
Rather, I think the point is that it is rather difficult to look at the Jews of Belgium from 1933 onward and see an assimilation success story.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:55 am
“The Council of Nicaea resoloved some theological issues (mainly Ariaism) and issued a bunch of practical “how-to” directives the most significant was to determine the dating of Easter.”
Yes,and in so doing it validated the notion of Christianity as a completely independent from and in opposition with its Jewish heritage. Which then lent full credence to Paul’s rabid antisemitism and calls for blood libel, and rendered the views of the generally more moderate jewish-christians- let alone other sects- heretical and punishable by excommunication and exile.
These are hardly minor points. It’s a wonder that the book of Matthew is in the bible at all.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:28 am
Hector: It’s not that Jesus was always meek and mild. Of course not. But Paul (and Augustine) have this pathological obsession with sin that simply isn’t there in Jesus. To be fair to Augustine, part of his hangup is the influence of manicheanism and neoplatonism. You don’t see this in Peter or John. Nor do you see it in Thomas or Scotus or Albert the Great or even Abelard. I know Evangelicalism pretty well, and I’ve seen close-up the self-flagellatory attitudes toward sin present in Paul and Augustine. Still, I blame Paul and his own hangups more than I blame Augustine.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:10 am
And seconding Hector in #63, I should point out that one of the most bloody-minded books in the new testament, Revelation, was written by an original apostle, John, not by Paul.
I think most people these days don’t think John of revelation fame was the same John of Gospel fame.
And in any case all of the gospels were more than likely not written down by the dudes whose names are on them, but rather by followers of schools of thought founded or otherwise alligned with those dudes. And not written down until at least a generation after the crucifixion.
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:39 am
Re: Yes,and in so doing it validated the notion of Christianity as a completely independent from and in opposition with its Jewish heritage.
Huh? In what sense was Ariaism regkective of a Jewish heritage? If anything, it harked back to Greek mythological models (and was expressed in the lmaguage of Greek metaphysics), not Judaic ideas.
Re: Which then lent full credence to Paul’s rabid antisemitism and calls for blood libel
Does you Bible have some books that are missing in mine? I can’t think of anything antisemitic in the Pauline Epiostles and certainly not any “blood libel”. The worst anti-Judaiac snarks in the NT are found in the Gospel of John. Paul (like Jesus) is opposed to the legalistic approaches (e.g., required circumcision; dietary regulations) to religion that were the mark of the Pharisees, but this does not make him antisemitic! He was of course himself a Jew and used Judaic imagery and models in his writing.
Re: It [Nicaea] decided which writing were in, and which writing were out.
This is simply not true. Nicaea did not deal with the canon of Scripture at all. This is a falsehood that has become regrettably common it seems. If I may quote Wikipedia here: “Contrary to the view popularised by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code there is no evidence to suggest that the Biblical canon was even discussed at the Council of Nicaea, let alone established or edited.” The NT canon had developed organically over the centuries; the four Gospels and Acts were always recognized, at least from the early 100s. The major Pauline Epistles were not controversial either. By the 300s the questionable books were Revelation, Peter, Hebrews and James– along with the Diadache, the Epistles of Clement the Protoevangelium of James and the Shepherd of Hermas. You haven’t heard (probably) of the second set because they were adjudged non-canonical late in the 300s, at the council of Carthage, where the canonicity of the former was also affirmed– although the Syriac Church still omits James and Revelation is looked on somewhat dubiously in Eastern Christendom and never read liturgically in Orthodox churches.
A for the OT canon, while there was a lot of debate about this in Jewish circles in the 1st century AD, Christianity simply accepted the canon that was in use by the Jews of Alexandria and until the Protestant reformers decided to toss out the Apocrypha in the 1500s there was not much debate about this among Christians.
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:12 am
1. Europeans are racists.
2. Muslims don’t assimilate very well. How many of your non-Muslim male friends ever married a Muslim woman? Ain’t happening. For that matter, Muslims look at the squishy culture of most Europeans and don’t see anything worth assimilating with. Muslims currently have an excess of cultural confidence inspired by the Wahhabist school of thought that has triumphed in the Muslim world over the last 30 years. Yes, your oil money paid for that.
3. Europeans are so multiculturalist that they find it impossible to suggest that immigrants should change their behaviours/modify their culture to fit in. They don’t appreciate the societal pathologies that have entered their countries but are intellectually powerless to do anything about it.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Re: I think most people these days don’t think John of revelation fame was the same John of Gospel fame.
Yes, he was. I rather think that Sacred Tradition on this matter is to be trusted more than the opinions of a bunch of postmodernist hipster higher critics.
The Beloved Disciple wrote the Gospel of John, the Letters of John, and the Apocalypse of John.
Re: Revelation is looked on somewhat dubiously in Eastern Christendom and never read liturgically in Orthodox churches.
I’m sorry to hear this- you miss some powerful imagery, particularly that of the City of God (last two chapters).
There was, interestingly enough, an alternative “Apocalypse of Peter” that was considered cannonical by some early Christians though finally rejected. Although it’s a vision of Heaven & Hell rather than of the end of the world.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Re: How many of your non-Muslim male friends ever married a Muslim woman?
This is illegal under Muslim canon law (though Muslim men are allowed to marry People of the Book) so it tends not to happen much.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:28 pm
I remeber reading an american paper that was published way back in the 20’s or 30’s bemoaning the fact that Italian immigrants were still eating pasta.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Re: Yes,and in so doing it validated the notion of Christianity as a completely independent from and in opposition with its Jewish heritage.
Er, this is….wrong, to put it mildly. The biggest opposition to mainstream, orthodox Christianity in the first few centuries came from those (like the Marcionites, Manichaeans, etc.) who wanted to dismiss the Old Testament as the work of the devil, and separate Christianity entirely from its Jewish roots. The work of the various orthodox Church Fathers was largely devoted to arguing that the Old Testament, as ugly and troublesome as it is in many places, did in fact prophecy Christ, and that much of the ugly and unpleasant bits have value in a typological sense. The anti-Old Testament impulse rose again in the tenth century in Bulgaria and the thirteenth century with the French Cathars.
Personally I think that Christianity went too far in the opposite direction from Uriel’s suggestion, that is in accepting the Old Testament wholesale, as inspired to the same degree as the New. I think it is definitely, as a whole, inspired, since Jesus made reference to it, and the spiritual beauty and truth in books like Isaiah, Daniel, etc. is evident. But I don’t think that _all_ of it is necessarily true or valuable, and especially the earlier works certainly are a work of its time, which was often an unpleasant one- Lot’s daughter’s, anyone?- and most of the Old Testament law was overturned by Christ, anyway. The Old Testament has importance as context for the coming of Christ, but the center of Christianity isn’t there. Christianity and Judaism are really two quite different religions- the very concept of a trinitarian God or an Incarnation are, as far as I know, fairly foreign to Judaism.
In short, Uriel, an early Christianity in which the heterodox sects won out would be a Christianity much less influenced by Judaism than the one we actually have.